In England these characteristics are accepted, and one hardly thinks of them. It is the foreigner's point of view of us. But in France, in war time, in a country all vibrant with emotionalism, this restraint of manner and speech and utter disregard of all "problems" and mysteries of life, and quiet, cheerful acceptation of the job in hand, startled the imagination of Englishmen who had been long enough away from home to stand aloof and to study those officers with a fresh vision. There was something superb in those simple, self- confident, normal men, who made no fuss, but obeyed orders, or gave them, with a spirit of discipline which belonged to their own souls and was not imposed by a self-conscious philosophy. And yet I could understand why certain Frenchmen, in spite of their admiration, were sometimes irritated by these British officers. There were times when the similarity between them, the uniformity of that ridiculous little moustache on the upper lip, the intonation of voices with the peculiar timbre of the public school drawl, sound to them rather tiresome. They had the manners of a caste, the touch of arrogance which belongs to a caste, in power. Every idea they had was a caste idea, contemptuous in a civil way of poor devils who had other ideas and who were therefore guilty—not by their own fault of course—of shocking bad form. To be a Socialist in such company would be worse than being drunk. To express a belief in democratic liberty would cause a silence to fall upon a group of them as though some obscenity beyond the limits allowed in an officers' mess-room had been uttered by a man without manners.
Their attitude to French officers was, in the beginning of the war, calculated to put a little strain upon the Entente Cordiale. It was an attitude of polite but haughty condescension. A number of young Frenchmen of the best families had been appointed as interpreters to the British Expedition. There were aristocrats among them whose names run like golden threads through the pages of French history. It was therefore disconcerting when the young Viscomte de Chose and a certain Marquis de Machin found that their knowledge of English was used for the purpose of buying a packet of cigarettes for a lieutenant who knew no French, and of running errands for British officers who accepted such services as a matter of course. The rank- and-file of the British army which first came into France was also a little careless of French susceptibilities. After the first rapture of that welcome which was extended to anyone in khaki, French citizens began to look a little askance at the regiments from the Highlands and Lowlands, some of whose men demanded free gifts in the shops, and, when a little drunk, were rather crude in their amorous advances to girls of decent up-bringing. These things were inevitable. In our regular army there were the sweepings of many slums, as well as the best blood of our peasantry and our good old families. Tough and hardened fellows called to the Colours again from Glasgow and Liverpool, Cardiff and Limehouse, had none of the refinements of the younger generation of soldiers who prefer lemonade to whisky, and sweetmeats to shag. It was these who in the first Expeditionary Force gave most trouble to the military police and found themselves under the iron heel of a discipline which is very hard and very necessary in time of war.
4
These men were heroic soldiers, yet our hero-worship need not blind us to the truth of things. There is nothing more utterly false than to imagine that war purges human nature of all its frailties and vices, and that under the shadow of death a great body of men gathered like this from many classes and cities, become suddenly white knights, sans-peur et sans reproche, inspired by the highest ideals of faith and chivalry. If only some new Shakespeare would come out of the ranks after this war to give us immortal portraits of a twentieth- century Falstaff, with a modern Nym, Pistol, and Bardolph—what a human comedy would be there in the midst of all this tragedy in France and Flanders, setting off the fine exalted heroism of all those noble and excellent men who, like the knights and men-at-arms of Henry at Agincourt, thought that "the fewer men the greater share of honour," and fought for England with a devotion that was careless of death.
After the British retreat from Mons, when our regular troops realized very rapidly the real meaning of modern warfare, knowing now that it was to be no "picnic," but a deadly struggle against great odds, and a fight of men powerless against infernal engines, there came out to France by every ship the oddest types of men who had been called out to fill up the gaps and take a share in the deadly business. These "dug-outs" were strange fellows, some of them. Territorial officers who had held commissions in the Yeomanry, old soldiers who had served in India, Egypt, and South Africa, before playing interminable games of chess in St. James's Street, or taking tea in country rectories and croquet mallets on country lawns; provincial schoolmasters who had commanded an O.T.C. with high-toned voices which could recite a passage from Ovid with cultured diction; purple-faced old fellows who for years had tempted Providence and apoplexy by violence to their valets; and young bloods who had once "gone through the Guards," before spending their week-ends at Brighton with little ladies from the Gaiety chorus, came to Boulogne or Havre by every boatload and astonished the natives of those ports by their martial manners.
The Red Cross was responsible for many astounding representatives of the British race in France, and there were other crosses—purple, green, blue, and black—who contributed to this melodrama of mixed classes and types. Benevolent old gentlemen, garbed like second- hand Field Marshals, tottered down the quaysides and took the salutes of startled French soldiers with bland but dignified benevolence. The Jewish people were not only generous to the Red Cross work with unstinted wealth which they poured into its coffers, but with rich young men who offered their lives and their motor-cars in this good service—though the greater part of them never went nearer to the front (through no fault of their own) than Rouen or Paris, where they spent enormous sums of money at the best hotels, and took lady friends for joy rides in ambulances of magnificent design. Boulogne became overcrowded with men and women wearing military uniforms of no known design with badges of mysterious import.
Even the Scotland Yard detectives were bewildered by some of these people whose passports were thoroughly sound, but whose costumes aroused deep suspicion. What could they do, for instance, with a young Hindu, dressed as a boy-scout, wearing tortoise-shell spectacles, and a field kit of dangling bags, water-bottles, maps, cooking utensils, and other material suitable for life on a desert isle? Or what could they say to a lady in breeches and top-boots, with a revolver stuck through her belt, and a sou'wester on her head, who was going to nurse the wounded in a voluntary hospital at Nice? Contingents of remarkable women invaded the chief tea-shops in Boulogne and caused a panic among the waitresses. They wore Buffalo Bill hats and blue uniforms with heavy blue coats, which were literally spangled with brass buttons. Upon their stalwart bosoms were four rows of buttons, and there was a row of brass on each side of their top-coats, on their shoulders, and at the back of their waist-belts. In the light of the tea-shop, where they consumed innumerable buns, one's eyes became dizzy with all these bits of shining metal. To a wounded man the sight of one of these ladies must have been frightening, as though a shell had burst near his bedside, with the glint of broken steel. Young officers just drafted out with commissions on which the ink was hardly dry, plucked at their budding moustaches and said "War is hell."
Some of the older officers, who had been called out after many years of civilian ease, found the spirit of youth again as soon as they set foot on the soil of France, and indulged in I the follies of youth as when they had been sub-lieutenants in the Indian hills. I remember one of these old gentlemen who refused to go to bed in the Hôtel Tortoni at Havre, though the call was for six o'clock next morning with quite a chance of death before the week was out. Some younger officers with him coaxed him to his room just before midnight, but he came down again, condemning their impudence, and went out into the great silent square, shouting for a taxi. It seemed to me pitiful that a man with so many ribbons on his breast, showing distinguished service, should be wandering about a place where many queer characters roam in the darkness of night. I asked him if I could show him the way back to the Hôtel Tortoni. "Sir," he said, "I desire to go to Piccadilly Circus, and if I have any of your impertinence I will break your head." Two apaches lurched up to him, a few minutes later, and he went off with them into a dark ally, speaking French with great deliberation and a Mayfair accent. He was a twentieth century Falstaff, and the playwright might find his low comedy in a character like this thrust into the grim horror of the war.
5
One's imagination must try to disintegrate that great collective thing called an army and see it as much as possible as a number of separate individualities, with their differences of temperament and ideals and habits of mind. There has been too much of the impersonal way of writing of our British Expeditionary Force as though it were a great human machine impelled with one idea and moving with one purpose. In its ranks was the coster with his cockney speech and cockney wit, his fear of great silences and his sense of loneliness and desolation away from the flare of gas-lights and the raucous shouts of the crowds in Petticoat Lane—so that when I met him in a field of Flanders with the mist and the long, flat marshlands about him he confessed to the almighty Hump. And there was the Irish peasant who heard the voice of the Banshee calling through that mist, and heard other queer voices of supernatural beings whispering to the melancholy which had been bred in his brain in the wilds of Connemara. Here was the English mechanic, matter-of-fact, keen on his job, with an alert brain and steady nerves; and with him was the Lowland Scot, hard as nails, with uncouth speech and a savage fighting instinct. Soldiers who had been through several battles and knew the tricks of old campaigners were the stiffening in regiments of younger men whose first experience of shell-fire was soul-shattering, so that some of them whimpered and were blanched with fear.